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EVANESCENCE Singer: All Albums ‘Have Always Been A Collaboration; I’ve Never Done It All Myself

Mary Ouellette of Loudwire recently conducted an interview with EVANESCENCE frontwoman Amy Lee. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Loudwire: So, there was a time when a new EVANESCENCE album was not something you were planning; what changed your path and brought you back to it?

Amy: It took me a long time to find the true vision for exactly what this record sounds like now. I went through a lot of pieces of it — separated — before it all came together. It’s funny, I think part of needing a break from EVANESCENCE made me rebel against the classic elements of EVANESCENCE like guitars. I had been writing for a while and I started listening back to the music. I was loving it but I came to the realization somewhere along the way that that’s what was missing, the band. The band wasn’t present enough. It wasn’t heavy, it wasn’t like an EVANESCENCE record and if I was going to be really honest, some of the music I had was more like a solo record.

Loudwire: So you had approached a crossroads?

Amy: I had a choice to make, am I going to do an EVANESCENCE record or not? It had been three years at that point that we’d been away from it and I missed it. I’d been feeling like, “Wow, that is a huge part of me and it sounds like it does because I love all of those elements,” so we spent the better part of 2010 and the first part of 2011 as a band just hammering stuff out and focusing on the band elements, writing songs as a team. [Producer] Nick Raskulinecz came in once we had the body of work that we really wanted to work on. He put us in pre-production together and made us focus even more on writing as a full band and arranging the songs that we already had. We ended up writing six or seven more songs just during the pre-production process, which is awesome. We just kept going and writing and writing. When you find something good, when you find something that sparks that inspiration, you don’t want to stop. You want to keep going until it’s exhausted. We really wrote a ton of music and worked on it for a long time and ended up with “Evanescence”, which I think where it ends up is you hear there’s some left turns. There’s some new attitudes, some new influences, but the band is the biggest thing that you’re hearing. I think that you’re hearing us at our strongest because of the way that we were working so much together.

Loudwire: People tend to associate Amy Lee with EVANESCENCE as if they are one in the same. Would you call this album the most collaborative album to date between yourself and the band?

Amy: The thing is, the albums have always been a collaboration; I’ve never done it all myself. I couldn’t, I need that other side. Most of the records were with one main collaborator — the first one was with Ben [Moody] and the second one was Terry [Balsamo]. This time, instead of having it be such a one on one intimate process, where I’m bringing my part to just one other person, I had a whole band to work with as that other collaborator. It’s still a collaboration but instead of just one guy, I had an awesome team and I think you can really hear that in the way that the instruments work together, weave in and out of each other, play off of each other, everything is built together so I think that the tightness comes through in a way that it never has before.